On our earlier visit to Masaya with Empowerment International and The Giving Lens, Masaya was belching out lots of sulfur dioxide… and the clouds of sulfur looked liked erupting mushroom clouds. I caught this cloud at its peak as the sun was putting on a fantastic show overhead.

My goal was to preserve textures in every part of the image…and keep it looking natural. Normally I would have used a GND filter to capture such a photograph, but because the GND Filter would darken the top of the smoke cloud, I chose to use our iHDR manual blending technique instead. That way, I could bring out the details I needed with the help of layers and masks in Photoshop.